Once again, TSA inspectors have failed to find 95% of the mock weapons sent through checkpoints by Homeland Security agents working undercover.

Just over two years ago, in June of 2015, I posted about tests Homeland Security had run at airports across the country. In those tests, undercover agents were sent through pre-boarding checkpoints run by the Transportation Security Administration. (Video from that original post is embedded below.)

Those agents carried realistic looking weapons and explosive devices past TSA screeners in order to determine how often the “weapons” would be detected. This included replicas of pistols, knives, nunchucks, tasers, ammunition, and even defused hand grenades.

Out of 70 items that should have been stopped, TSA screeners found a grand total of three of them. As I noted, at the time that translates to a failure rate of 95%. Not exactly a number that will make you feel happy as you stand in the giant line at the security checkpoint next time you fly somewhere.

Surely they’ve addressed those issues in those 2+ years and improved dramatically, though. After all, you could seemingly stumble into a higher level of success just by randomly guessing which passengers have some sort of contraband in their luggage. Right?

Undercover federal agents successfully snuck drugs and explosives past security screeners at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport last week, according to the local Fox affiliate.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conducted the test last Thursday by sending agents disguised as ordinary passengers into the airport in order to see if screeners were up to snuff, KMSP reported.

The TSA “red team” attempted to smuggle 18 different items past airport security that should easily be detected but prevailed almost every time, the Fox affiliate reported.

This is even more true in relation to a CopBlocker who is intelligent, knowledgeable of the law and citizens’ rights, and brave enough to confront the police when they see them violating those laws and/or trampling on people’s rights. It’s easy to bully someone when they don’t actually know whether what they are doing or witnessing someone else do is legal. Similarly, not everyone is willing to confront or stand up to a confrontation from armed people with a long and frequent history of violence, especially when those heavily armed people (significantly) more often than not literally get away with murder.

In light of that and Adam’s continued vigilance, it’s obviously no surprise that the police in upstate New York have an axe to grind with Adam. When all you have is a hammer and a low IQ, everything looks like a nail that needs to be violently hammered into submission. If that nail refuses to stay down and embarrasses you publicly by showing what a corrupt tyrant you are (on video for the world to see), then that’s even more so the case.

Cops have a pretty extensive history of retaliation and they rarely will even try to hide it very well. In fact, they probably want other potential “trouble makers” to see it as a warning to keep in line. The problem (for the police) is that they aren’t used to people opposing them in any sort of meaningful or effective way. They generally are in a position of power against people that are vulnerable economically or socially and therefore unable to fight back. It’s not often that they have to go beyond an initial act of physical or financial intimidation to make their “problem” go away.

Oftentimes when that doesn’t work the police are so frustrated and angry that they tend to overreach in their secondary efforts at retaliation and intimidation. They come up with charges that don’t actually fit and twist them until that square peg fits in the round hole they want to use it for. Frequently, they also want to make sure that sledgehammer is big enough to swat that fly once and for all. So they make sure the penalty attached to the charges they distort to punish and intimidate that annoying CopBlocker, who had the nerve to hold them accountable to the laws everyone else has to abide by, is sufficiently egregious to teach him a lesson once and for all.

Unfortunately for them, that type of overreach often has the opposite effect. The charges are too outrageously inappropriate to hold up, the general public recognizes the blatant effort by police to attack someone whose only real crime is criticizing them, and the publicity created only highlights the abuses and crimes that the cops were trying to keep from being exposed in the first place.

A person is guilty of reckless endangerment in the second degree when he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person. Reckless endangerment in the second degree is a class A misdemeanor.

Reckless Endangerment of Property:
A person is guilty of reckless endangerment of property when he recklessly engages in conduct which creates a substantial risk of damage to the property of another person in an amount exceeding two hundred fifty dollars. Reckless endangerment of property is a class B misdemeanor.

There are several aspects of those laws that have to be proven in order to sustain a conviction on those charges. The first hurdle to get over is proving that Adam acted recklessly. That’s by far the easiest to do, because that’s largely an opinion-based conclusion. The second requirement is where things start to get a bit more difficult, though.

In the case of the Second Degree Reckless Endangerment charge, that requires proving that his actions would have caused “serious physical injury” or death to another person. Serious physical injury means physical injury that “causes serious or permanent disfigurement, serious impairment of health or loss or protracted impairment of the function of any bodily organ or limb and that creates a reasonable risk of death.”

(B) results in permanent impairment of a body function or permanent damage to a body structure; or

(C) necessitates medical or surgical intervention to preclude permanent impairment of a body function or permanent damage to a body structure.

Adam’s Stolen Drone

It requires a huge stretch of the imagination to believe that Adam’s little two pound drone would actually pose a real threat to harm anyone in such a serious and potentially permanent way.

However, it’s the “substantial risk” aspect of both laws that should blow the wheels off of this glorified witch hunt against Adam. Substantial risk means a strong possibility, as contrasted with a remote or even a significant possibility, that a certain result may occur or that a certain circumstance may exist. It is risk of such a nature and degree that to disregard it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in such a situation.

A substantial risk of serious harm means that the risk was so great that it was almost certain to materialize if nothing was done. [Miller v. Fisher, 2010 U.S. App. LEXIS 12932 (7th Cir. Ill. June 23, 2010)]

The idea that Adam’s drone would have caused injuries that would result in permanent disfigurement or physical disabilities had someone not prevented it is a silly claim on the face of it. Furthermore, the fact that no-one prevented him from flying a drone to avoid these imminent and unavoidable injuries in the past, along with the reality that those injuries in fact didn’t happen, proves that it’s nonsense. Even the reckless endangerment of property charge can’t be supported based on that, because the drone was stolen from Adam after it had crashed and it didn’t do $250 worth of damage to anyone’s property (or permanently disfigure anyone, either).

In fact, the idea that the tiny (compared to the 7 foot, 50 pound version the Montgomery Sheriff’s Office crashed) drone that Adam was using represents a substantial risk of harm is laughable. Nobody was injured in either of the crashes by the Montgomery County SWAT team’s drone or at least six other documented crashes by police department drones. As a matter of fact, the FAA has compiled a list of 104 (as of Oct. 2014) drone crashes since 2010. Not one single injury has been reported as a result.

This is a silly retaliatory bully tactic that can and in all likelihood will be exposed for exactly what it is. It’s nothing more than a convenient opportunity to try intimidate and retaliate against Adam and to send a message to anyone else that might think about standing up to the thugs employed by the Albany Police and other nearby police departments.

Let the Albany Police Know What You Think of Their Actions Against Adam Rupeka!

Although they tend to be pretty good at finding oversized contact solution containers and mothers with unauthorized breast milk, the Transportation Security Administration has once again shown that they pretty much can’t find any actual weapons. In the latest series of tests where undercover Homeland Security Agents took realistic looking weapons through airport checkpoints to test the TSA screeners, they failed to find those “weapons” 67 times out of 70 attempts. That boils down to 95% of the time that had someone actually been walking through with a hand grenade and shiny pistol like the one to the left, they would have made their flight with time to spare.

As thorough as the Transportation Security Administration screeners may be as they rifle through your belongings, the agency isn’t performing where it counts.

In a series of trials, the Department of Homeland Security was able to smuggle fake explosives, weapons and other contraband past airport screeners in major cities across the country, according to ABC News. Officials briefed on the Homeland Security Inspector General’s investigation told the station that the TSA failed 67 out of 70 tests conducted by the department’s Red Teams — undercover passengers tasked with identifying weaknesses in the screening process, NJ.com reports.

During the tests, DHS agents each tried to bring a banned item past TSA screeners. They succeeded 95 percent of the time…

In one test an undercover agent was stopped after setting off an alarm at a magnetometer, but TSA screeners failed to detect a fake explosive device that was taped to his back during a follow-on pat down.

In the wake of the most recent massive failure, the head of the TSA has been re-assigned (but not fired obviously, because he works in a government job and that just doesn’t happen, even if the agency you run has a .050 batting average on the one thing they are actually supposed to do.) Also, they’re going to enhance those techniques again and look for some more expensive and faulty equipment to buy.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Monday reassigned the leader of the Transportation Security Administration and directed the agency to revise airport security procedures, retrain officers and retest screening equipment in airports across the country.

The TSA’s acting administrator, Melvin Carraway, is being reassigned to a different job in the Department of Homeland Security. Acting Deputy Director Mark Hatfield will lead the agency until a new administrator is appointed.

The directives come after the agency’s inspector general briefed Johnson on a report analyzing vulnerabilities in airport security — specifically, the ability to bring prohibited items through TSA checkpoints.

Johnson would not describe the results of the classified report, but said he takes the findings “very seriously.”